In the US and Canada alone, we're wasting $6,000 worth of food every second- and most of this food waste comes from our own homes.
"About 60% of consumers are throwing food away prematurely," explained the Natural Resources Defense Council project scientist, Dana Gunders in Grant Baldwin and Jen Rustemeyer's documentary, "Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story."
As a result, in our households, we're wasting between 15% and 25% of the food that we're buying.
"That's expensive," said Gunders. "Imagine walking out of a grocery store with four bags of groceries, dropping one in the parking lot, and not bothering to pick it up. That's essentially what we're doing in our homes today."
One of the main reasons we continue to "drop a quarter of our bags in the parking lot" is because of the confusing nature of date labels.
There are "sell by" and "best by" (or "use by") dates on food products, but the customer should really only see the latter, explained Tristram Stuart, author and food waste expert, in the documentary: "The 'sell by' date shouldn't appear visibly. It should be encoded so that only staff understand it because it confuses people. They say 'display until,' customers see it, and they think, 'Oh, I can't eat it after that day.'"
In actuality, the "sell by" date is a communication between the manufacturer and the store, "saying, 'If you sell this product by this date, I promise that when your consumer gets it home, it will still have a shelf life left," Gunders explained.
What's more, you can typically eat food after the "best by" or "use by" date. "Those date labels - especially the 'best before' date - it's really all about peak freshness, it has absolutely nothing to do with safety," Rustemeyer told NPR. "And I think people are getting really confused and thinking that's the absolute last moment that they can possibly consume that item, and it's leading to a lot of waste."
As Stuart explained in the documentary, "I've talked to manufacturers of pies, for example, and their 'use by' date isn't the date that they think that it's going to become dangerous - it's the date they think the pastry will stop being perfectly crisp."
Next time you're cleaning out your fridge, or at the grocery store trying to decide how much food you need for the week, think about that one full bag of groceries laying in the parking lot.